Reading up on Bitcoin, Blockchain and Beyond

Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper is neither a tech nor a finance book, but it provided me with a great introduction to Bitcoin. It describes at length the varied backgrounds and motivations of the people that were instrumental in getting it off the ground.

After you’ve read the book and learned the basics, Coindesk is a great source of current news on all things blockchain, cryptocurrency and so on. For specific questions, there is also a Bitcoin Stack Exchange Q&A site.

Of course, one of the most interesting things to come out of Bitcoin is not the cryptocurrency itself, but the blockchain, a distributed alternative to the centralized ledgers used in finance everywhere, it is built upon.

Blockchain, Distributed Ledgers

Unfortunately, a blockchain as used by Bitcoin has features that make it unsuitable for certain uses; poor scalability and slow speed of processing and confirming transactions being two of them.

There are, however, several projects that try to address these issues, such as Juno which specifically targets greater throughput performance.

Microsoft even has a blockchain project for its cloud computing service Azure called Project Bletchley.

But, the most interesting, in my opinion, distributed ledger project right now is R3 Corda. This is a joint venture between a number of banks aiming to built a distributed ledger specifically for financial transactions. What makes Corda stand out among the many blockchain/distributed ledger projects is that it is not a technology project looking for applications. Instead they are taking real requirements from the world of finance and try to mold the technology to fit them. As Richard Gendal Brown, R3’s Chief Technology Officer, writes in their introduction:

Every successful project I’ve worked on started with the requirements, not some cool piece of technology.

Richard Gendal Brown, by the way, also has his own blog Thoughts on the Future of Finance, on which he discusses technology in the financial sector in general (e.g. Apple Pay), not just distributed ledgers. Highly recommended.

Smart Contracts

Looking beyond finance, there is Ethereum which has built a smart contract platform on its blockchain. One example of such a smart contract is The DAO, a kind of investment company bound by bylaws written in code instead of legal prose. Since the company exists only virtually, it’s still unclear which country’s laws govern it. Its creators say a DAO is self-governing, i.e. its actions determined only by its coding and thereby not subject to outside influence such as a regulator.

[I]t is very challenging to write smart contracts that are both complex in nature and 100% safe. Therefore, it’s fair to say that the discussion of any Ethereum-based project should be handled with the great care it deserves.

Speaking of Slock.it: they have used the Ethereum blockchain as the backbone of a neat IoT project: the Ethereum computer powering smart locks called slocks.